92 "é INTRODUCES 00) Ii oo '0\ "'. .:. .. . ::' " 0.:.. -- s> ;' - > Palm Green * Bali Blue * HibiEcan Blush * 6amboo Yellow * Samoan Sand \ * TropIc Mist J ....:7 Wallet $3.95 Cigarette Case $2.00 Glasses and Ke-y Ca es $1.00 pJ!Js tax " \\\ \ -;. '" \ < 4t IJeiie4 ßb:vuu g Aøte . '\. rf'" ;:'411" '\. , . CREATED BY g =D WISCONSIN THe SKY LINe J ..11 l T he Red-Brick Beehzves E VERYONE whose activities have taken him up and down the East Side in the last few years must have noticed some bold alterations in the sky line, beginning just north of Brook- lyn Bridge and extending to 155 th Street-occasional groupings of brand- new oblong prisms of red brick, ten to fourteen stories hi h, set at brief intervals and '-' ...... looking like enormous build- ing blocks arranged by a tidy but too methodical child. ".;.: \\Thoever has visited the East Side must also have noticed occasional wide-open spaces, lately cleared of the tenements and decrepit business buildings that had huddled there, where more oblong prisms of red brick are soon to appear. Those who have gone farther afield ha ve seen similar clusters of oblong '-' prisms of the same forbidding institu- tIonal pattern, even in sections of the city that were not built up so intensive- ly, such as the distant reaches of Brook- lyn and the Bronx, and along Dyck- man Street, toward the northern tip of Manhattan. From the outsIde, these new build- ings look as if they had all been de- signed by one mind, carried out by one organization, in tended for one class of people, bred like bees to fit into these honeycombs. But though the differ- ences are trivial, some of these projects are the work of the New York City Housing Authority, some belong to the big life-insurance companies; some are for the lowest-income groups, whose old slum dwellings have been razed, and some for middle-class and, as in the case of Peter Cooper Village, even upper-middle-class occupants; some are subsidized by the federal government or the state, some are the investments, and profitable ones, of corporations. Strange to say, dozens of architectural firms, in free rivalry, produced those masterpieces of regimentation. The lead in spreading this new type of hous- ing, which departs from all earlier patterns of residential development in New York, was taken by the Hous- ing Authority, first in the East RIver project at First Avenue and 102nd Street, finished in 1 941 , and then in the Fort Greene project, north of Fort Greene Park, in Brooklyn, finished in 1 944. This official pat- tern not only has been followed by the Housing Authority ever since but has been sedulously imitated by the private t I investors who have gone Into this field, and it has no\v begun to exercise a dead- ening influence on housing through- out the country, even in Los Angeles and St. Louis, which had never known residential building of such height, with its resulting unprecedented densIty of popula tion. The Housing Authority alone already has twenty- three such housing units in operation, and it is construct- ing or is about to construct thirty-eight more. (There are, in addition, some tem- porary projects for veterans. ) The total population accommodated in these new municipal projects will run between two hundred and ten and two hundred and twenty thousand. All in all, this is the most gigantic effort at slum clearance and redevelopment New York has ever made. In fact, this new system of housing is altering the face of the city almost as definitely as the dumbbell "model tenements" of 1879 and the "new-law" tenements, which invaded the upper Bronx in solid phalanxes after 1 90 1. These new buildings are plainly su- perior in every respect to the dark, congested, insanitary, rat-infested Man- hattan slums they have replaced, and they are Immeasurably better than the dwellings built many years back wIth money provided by such philanthropists as Alfred T. White and still called "model tenements" only a generafion ago. If anyone should be tempted by these remarks to look at, say, the Au- thority's Amsterdam Houses, on Am- sterdam Avenue between Sixty-first and Sixty-fourth Streets, he should, for the sake of the startling comparison, also look at the old City and Suburban Homes model tenements on Sixty-eighth Street, between Amsterdam and \\1 est End Avenues, built in 1897. Both exter- nally and internally, Amsterdam Houses show a colossal advance. As I have said before, these new housIng estates are, in such essentials as air, light, open space, and quiet, better than the quarters pro- vided for the upper-income groups on Park A venue. But this comparison is tricky; a person who has survived typhus fever is naturally happy to be alive, but he is not yet a healthy, vig- orous man, certain that life will be worth living. The most disturbing thing about these new quarters is that-except in a few minor examples on the out- skirts of the city, where building sites are . I r . 1 lit